Preface
This book examines my favorite area: customer intelligence and analytics. I am no stranger to this field; I have been doing this for years, in the beginning passively delivering what I should, but over time growing more and more confident. In the beginning I was delivering ad hoc reports; in the end I was producing the information strategies that fueled successful company turnarounds.
At the start of my career in customer intelligence and analytics, I used phrases like these: “Information is a strategic asset,” “The technical part of business intelligence is the easy part,” “competing on analytics,” “It is not about IT, it is about decision support.” Because these terms all seemed like useful buzzwords to me, I used them. I still use these phrases today, but now I understand them. They are more than hot air—they mean something, and they are confirmed facts. I hope that by reading this book and using it actively, you will come to the same conclusion.
I was once a national training manager for an analytical company and the courses developed by my predecessor were in ANOVA, regression, neural networks, and different types of software. We had salespeople who would call customers and ask them whether they would like to buy a course in how to do regression or something else. This was a challenging assignment. If the prospective customers were already knowledgeable about the subject, they would not buy; if they did not know the topic, the salesperson could not explain what ...
